Why and where Taiwanese fisherman Hung Shih-cheng was killed last week is still unclear, but his death is a brutally vivid illustration of how quickly the competing territorial claims in the Far East can turn to bloodshed.

The death of Hung as Philippines coast guards raked his trawler with machine-gun fire has caused a diplomatic storm between Taiwan and the Manila government.

There is not yet any firm information about what happened, but the story so far is that Hung’s trawler was discovered in Philippine waters and the coast guards opened fire when he attempted to ram their cutter.

It is perhaps fortunate that this sorry incident occurred between two of the lesser players in the increasingly dangerous territorial disputes in the East China and South China seas.

Most dangerous are the daily confrontations between the Chinese and Japanese militaries in the East China Sea. Beijing claims ownership of the Japanese-held Senkaku Islands, which the Chinese call Diaoyutai.

Since late last year, Chinese ships and air force planes have regularly intruded into the territorial waters and air space of the islands, pushing Japan to deploy armed coast guard cutters and to scramble jet fighters.

There are reports of Chinese warships locking their targeting radar for missiles on Japanese ships and planes, the last move before firing.

Japan has also reported the presence earlier this month of submarines that it believes to be Chinese entering its 12-nautical-mile territorial waters around Kume Island in the Japan’s southern Ryukyu chain which includes the major United States military base on Okinawa island.

Adding to the intensity of this already finely balanced dispute has been highly publicized statements in the last few days by Chinese academics and a well-known ultranationalist People’s Liberation Army general questioning Japan’s sovereignty over the Ryukyu Islands.

The arguments in Chinese state-controlled media is that Japan incorporated the Ryukyus into its empire in 1879. But as an independent kingdom before that, the Ryukyus had been a vassal state of China’s and paid tribute since 1372.

The claims about the Ryukyus appear aimed at trying to undermine Japan’s sovereignty over the Senkakus at the end of the chain.

But other editorials in Chinese state media have warned that this is a dangerous tack likely to harden public opinion in Japan, where the nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe enjoys the support of over 70 per cent of the population, in part because of his tough stance against China.

These editorials have also warned that the argument about the Ryukyus will alarm other countries which were regarded as vassal states by imperial China, such as Mongolia, Korea, all the states making up modern Southeast Asia, Nepal and Bhutan.

There are already regular threatening confrontations between Chinese surveillance ships and those of Vietnam and the Philippines.

Beijing is in dispute with Hanoi and Manila as well as Brunei and Malaysia over ownership of the Paracel and Spratly island chains in the South China Sea.

Beijing claims ownership of the whole of the sea down to Indonesian waters over 1,200 kilometres south of the nearest indisputable Chinese landfall on Hainan Island.

Among the many territorial disputes in Asian waters is one between Taiwan and the Philippines over where the line dividing their maritime exclusive economic zones should be.

But from what is known about the position of Hung’s trawler — which he crewed with his son, son-in-law and an Indonesian deckhand who were uninjured in the shooting — he was well within Philippine waters.

That has not calmed outrage in Taiwan The island’s President Ma Ying-jeou has latched onto the issue, perhaps in the hope of bolstering his fading popularity, which by some polls is as low as 13 per cent.

Ma’s administration has kept the issue alive by dismissing as “insincere” the statement of “deep regret” issued by Philippines’ President Begnino Aquino immediately after the incident.

To back its demand for a proper apology, the Taipei government is imposing a raft of sanctions, including a ban on new Filipino workers entering the country and insistence that the 88,000 Filipinos already working in Taiwan leave once their contracts are over.

This storm will undoubtedly blow over before it seriously affects the $1-billion-a-year two-way trade between the two countries.

Taiwan and the Philippines have too much in common as political and military allies in Asia for this incident to be allowed to spiral into a serious breach.

Quite apart from anything else, the Taiwanese and Filipinos are blood cousins.

Most of Taiwan’s aborigines came over several thousand years from the Philippines, a mere 250 kilometres to the south. When refugees from China started arriving on Taiwan about 500 years ago, they and succeeding waves of settlers frequently intermarried with the local people.

Modern DNA studies suggest that up to 90 per cent of Taiwanese are of mixed Chinese and aboriginal ancestry.

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Jonathan Manthorpe: Asia’s territorial disputes claim the life of a Taiwanese fisherman

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